Tax law says that if a corporation issues options for employees to buy the company’s stock in the future for its price when the option issued, then if the stock has gone up in value when employees exercise the options, the company gets to deduct the difference between what the employee bought it for and its market price.

When, as Facebook expects, the 187 million stock options are cashed in this year, Facebook will get $7.5 billion in tax deductions (which will reduce the company’s federal and state taxes by $3 billion). According to Facebook, these tax deductions should exceed the company’s U.S. taxable 2012 income and result in a net operating loss (NOL) that can then be carried back to the preceding two years to offset its past taxes, resulting in a refund of up to $500 million.

Facebook’s filing papers with the Securities and Exchange Commission confirm as much:

Option exercise activity would generate a corporate income tax deduction [that] exceeds our other U.S. taxable income [and] will result in a net operating loss (NOL) that can be carried back to the preceding two years to offset our taxable income for U.S. federal income tax purposes, as well as in some states, which would allow us to receive a refund of some of the corporate income taxes we paid in those years. Based on the assumptions above, we anticipate that this refund could be up to $500 million.

“Due to the stock option loophole, Facebook may not pay any corporate income taxes on its profits for a generation,” said Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI). “It isn’t right, and we can’t afford it.” The Treasury Department estimates that it loses about $2 billion per year due to companies using this stock option loophole to avoid taxes.

The resolution was a response to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling. While advocates acknowledged the council’s vote has no legal authority, they said it was nonetheless important symbolism:

“I can’t think of a more important thing to talk about than democracy. It is being threatened,” said Eric Johnson, a small-business owner from Portland. “You need to help us be heard. There is no more important issue.”

Anna Trevorrow said, “It is absolutely the business of the City Council. The community has come together and asked you to make a statement.”

Mayor Michael Brennan, along with [Councilor David] Marshall and councilors Kevin Donoghue, John Anton, Jill Duson and Nicholas Mavodones, supported the resolution.

The measure’s sponsor said the Occupy Wall Street movement inspired him to submit the non-binding resolution. Maine’s two congressmen, Rep. Mike Michaud (D) and Chellie Pingree (D) have both been critical of the Citizens decision, as has Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME).

Los Angeles, New York City, and a handful of cities held similar votes last year.

The company that Amy worked for before her breakdown, and that she finds herself attempting to reform, is literally called Abaddon, after the place of destruction in Jewish religious texts and the king of the Pit in Revelation. Amy hopes to implement a corporate responsibility program when she comes back to work after her stint in rehab, but instead finds herself in the basement, consigned to a program for people the company considers kooks, but who they can’t fire. When she tries to convince HR to give her a task force or let her act as a community liaison by giving the department head a printout of stories about Abaddon’s environmental and labor problems, the woman is actively frightened that talking about those issues will get them both fired. Amy’s former assistant shuts her down when Amy suggests that they could be getting into bed with a company responsible for industrial accidents in India. The inertia and terror are deep.

And when Amy tries to get a job with a non-profit, she’s devastated to learn that the salary on offer at a place where she thinks she’d fit in is $26,000, just $2,000 more than her bill from the rehab center. “I can’t live on $26,000 a year. I’m in debt, I’m living with my mother,” Amy cries to the man interviewing her for a job at a homeless shelter. “There are all these things I want to do. And I can’t. And it’s so frustrating.” Of course it is. And it’s a huge problem that we can’t make socially responsible and socially fulfilling work financially rewarding, much less viable, for people with debt and bills.

Payday loan interest rates in the Show Me State average nearly 60 percentage points higher than the rest of the nation, 445 percent to 391 percent. Fed up with the disastrous effect that such predatory lending is having on poorer Missourians, a group of citizens, religious groups and civic organizations are gathering signatures for a proposed November ballot initiative that would restrict payday lending interest rates in the state to 36 percent.

Payday lending companies, ruffled by the prospect of being able to charge a mere 36 percent interest rate, have teamed up to fight the initiative. Two weeks ago, a new group – Stand Up Missouri – emerged, purporting to represent “consumers, businesses, civic groups, and faith-based organizations.” However, a look at their finance records reveals that the group is funded – to the tune of $216,000 – by just seven payday lending corporations, including Tower Loan, Western Shamrock Corporation, and Brundage Management Company. The front group’s CEO and chairman, Tom Hudgins, is the vice president of Western Shamrock Corporation.

In its first two weeks of existence, Stand Up Missouri has already taken an Orwellian approach to the term “payday lending” – they prefer the phrase “traditional installment loan” – and invoked the Civil Rights Era to defend why payday lenders ought to be allowed to gouge consumers. An ad on their homepage currently explains to viewers how payday lenders are just like Dr. King and Civil Rights Era marchers:

AD: You had poor people who followed Dr. King and walked with him hundreds of miles because they believed in civil rights that much. In this day and time, when can we say we’ve seen something like that where people are willing to leave their job to support something that they believe in? We have that statement, “actions speak louder than words,” and that’s why I’m here. That’s why it was important for me to take time off to be here because I believe wholeheartedly in the company that believes in me.”

Stand Up Missouri joins another pro-payday lending group in the state called Missourians for Equal Credit Opportunity, which has used a loophole in campaign finance law to hide whoever or whatever corporation(s) gave $600,000 to combat the initiative.

It’s not difficult to see why payday lenders are fighting the consumer effort so vociferously. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch details just how ubiquitous payday lending has become in Missouri: “In 2010, there were about 1,040 payday loan stores in Missouri, according to the Missouri Division of Finance. Missouri is second only to Tennessee among its neighbors in the number of licensed payday lenders. Some 2.43 million payday loans were made in Missouri in 2010.”

The proposed 36 percent interest rate cap is also not without precedent. Until the mid-1990s, Missouri law restricted lenders to a 28 percent ceiling.

Americans across the country are voicing their concerns with Lowe’s prejudice. Religious advocates and even entertainers including Kal Penn, Russell Simmons, and Mia Farrow are urging a boycott of the company. So incensed over Loew’s “un-American” and “naked religious bigotry,” California state Sen. Ted Lieu (D) is boycotting the company and is looking into (unlikely) legal ramifications of Lowe’s decision:

“Lowe’s is engaged in religious discrimination… it is utter nonsense, it is religious bigotry, and I’m just stunned that Lowe’s pulled their advertising,” he said. “Those views from the Florida Family Association are completely bigoted.” [...]

“If the show was called All-American Asian, or All-American Jew or All-American Latino, don’t you think the outcry would be a lot different? For some reason, people seem to think that it’s okay to discriminate against Muslim-Americans, and I’m just trying to say, ‘no, it’s not,’” he said.

Other lawmakers, including Muslim pioneers, are equally disgusted with the company:

Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN): One of two Muslim House representatives, Ellison blasted Lowe’s for choosing “to uphold the beliefs of a fringe hate group and not the creed of The First Amendment.” He added, “Corporate America needs to take a stand against these anti-Muslim fringe groups and stand up for what is right because this is what it means to be an America.”

Rep. Andre Carson (D-IN): Also a Muslim representative, Carson said Lowe’s decision “runs contrary to our American ideal of combating expressions of hate and division while defending those oppressed by intolerance.”

Rep. John Conyers (D-MI): A strong advocate against religious discrimination and the representative of the town in which the series is filmed, Conyers demanded the Lowe’s “unequivocally apologize to the Muslim and Arab American community and strongly repudiate the intolerant messages espoused by anti-Muslim groups.”

State Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI): The first Muslim elected to the Michigan legislature, Tlaib wrote Lowe’s CEO Robert Niblock, “I told them I was extremely disappointed that you give credibility to these hate groups.”

Hip Hop mogul (and Buddhist) Russell Simmons purchased ad time during this week’s episode of “All-American Muslim” to counter Loew’s. In doing so, ad time for this Sunday’s show is “now sold out.” The computer hacking group Anonymous also contributed to the effort by “working through 15 layers of security to breach its website,” forcing FFA to shut it down Monday night.

But a reality TV show that lets Americans relate to the lives of Muslims in the United States is an offensive idea to those who want to demonize Islam. The Florida Family Association (FFA) launched a campaign earlier this year to get companies to pull their advertising from the program. FFA claims that 65 of the 67 companies targeted have done this, including home improvement giant Lowe’s and megabank Bank of America:

The Florida Family Association, a Tampa Bay group, has led a campaign urging companies to pull ads on “All-American Muslim.” The FFA contends that 65 of 67 companies it has targeted have pulled their ads, including Bank of America, the Campbell Soup Co., Dell, Estee Lauder, General Motors, Goodyear, Green Mountain Coffee, McDonalds, Sears, and Wal-Mart.

One of the companies that FFA claims pulled commercials, Amway, told the Washington Post that such reports were “misleading” and that it has done no such thing. Lowe’s told the paper that it did indeed pull advertising. “We understand the program raised concerns, complaints, or issues from multiple sides of the viewer spectrum, which we found after doing research of news articles and blogs covering the show,” said Katie Cody, a spokeswoman for Lowe’s.

The Islamic Circle of North America is urging concerned citizens to call Lowe’s and protest their withdrawal of advertising: “We urge the American Muslim community and our friends, family, neighbors and all people of conscience to call Lowe’s CEO Robert Niblock at (704) 758-2084 or Executive Support Mr. Andrew Kilby at (866) 900-4650 and respectfully complain about this decision.”

General Electric spent more lobbying the government than it did in federal income taxes between 2008 and 2010.

Today, thousands of 99 Percenters will march on K Street in Washington, D.C. as a part of an action called “Take Back The Capitol,” taking aim at the lobbying firms that corporate interests use to influence the federal government.

A report released this month by Public Campaign demonstrates just how important it is for Americans to battle corporate special interests and reclaim our democracy. The group’s research finds that thirty big corporations actually spent more money lobbying the federal government between 2008 and 2010 than they spent in taxes. For example, General Electric — one of the top 10 most profitable companies in the world — got a net tax rebate of $4.7 billion during this period. Meanwhile, it spent $84 million lobbying the federal government.

Here’s the full list of the 30 corporations identified and what they paid in federal taxes as opposed to lobbying:

To follow today’s actions, check out Take Back The Capitol’s website, and find instant updates about the protest through the hashtag #99indc. ThinkProgress will be covering today’s events at our 99 Percent Movement special topics page.

American Airlines CEO Arpey decided to retire and skip the golden parachute.

This week, American Airlines, the world’s fourth largest airline, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. This is a step that former CEO Gerard Arpey, who just resigned, did not want to take.

For years, major airlines have “slashed wages and pensions after similarly declaring bankruptcy,” using the financial process to avoid obligations to their workers. For example, when United Airlines declared bankruptcy, its employees faced the “single largest pension default in U.S. history.” Some pilots at Aloha Airlines lost 90 percent of their retirement benefits after that business declared bankruptcy.

So instead of leading the company through bankruptcy, Arpey decided to retire after 30 years with the company, denying him any severance pay.

D. Michael Lindsay, the president of Gordon College, interviewed Arpey for a New York Times op-ed about his choice. Arpey told Lindsay that he wanted his company to honor its commitments to its workers:

When we discussed the prospect of bankruptcy at American he spoke with an almost defiant tone of the company’s commitment to its employees and holders of its stock and debt. “I believe it’s important to the character of the company and its ultimate long-term success to do your very best to honor those commitments,” he said. “It is not good thinking — either at the corporate level or at the personal level — to believe you can simply walk away from your circumstances.”

“This country would be so much better off if we had more people who had Gerard Arpey’s sense of responsibility and character as well as ability,” said David Boren, the president of the University of Oklahoma and a former governor and U.S. senator.

Arpey distinguishes himself from his predecessor, Donald Carty. Carty resigned “after it was disclosed that…executives’ pensions were protected in a separate trust, at a time when union members were being asked to approve deep concessions for their members.”

This rampant predatory lending helped inflate the housing bubble; a Center for American Progress investigation actually found huge racial disparities in lending at the big banks that wound up getting bailed out, with minority borrowers far more likely to receive high-priced loans.

One former banker for Chase — James Theckston — told the New York Times’ Nick Kristof that not only did his bank push minority borrowers into higher-priced loans, but senior executives then tried to cover up the racial disparity in their banks’ lending:

One memory particularly troubles Theckston. He says that some account executives earned a commission seven times higher from subprime loans, rather than prime mortgages. So they looked for less savvy borrowers — those with less education, without previous mortgage experience, or without fluent English — and nudged them toward subprime loans.

These less savvy borrowers were disproportionately blacks and Latinos, he said, and they ended up paying a higher rate so that they were more likely to lose their homes. Senior executives seemed aware of this racial mismatch, he recalled, and frantically tried to cover it up.

“The bigwigs of the corporations knew this, but they figured we’re going to make billions out of it, so who cares? The government is going to bail us out. And the problem loans will be out of here, maybe even overseas,” Theckston explained.

In 2006, Chase made high-price loans to 16.4 percent of white borrowers, while nearly half of black borrowers and more than one-third of Hispanic borrowers received high-price loans. These disparities help explain why, according to a new report from the Center on Responsible Lending, Latinos and blacks are twice as likely to have been impacted by the housing crisis as whites. In fact, “approximately one quarter of all Latino and African-American borrowers have lost their home to foreclosure or are seriously delinquent, compared to just under 12 percent for white borrowers.”

Over the holiday season the workers “struggle to survive,” Dayton said, and “the lockout has devastated families, communities, and the economy in Northwestern Minnesota.” Desperate to get back to work but determined to stand by their principles, the workers have had prayer vigils with faith leaders in the community.

But Crystal Sugar President and CEO Dave Berg apparently has absolutely no sympathy for his workers’ plight. In fact, at a recent meeting with shareholders, he compared them to a cancerous tumor:

In a meeting of company shareholders on November 7 in Grafton, ND, Berg likened the workers to a 21-pound cancerous tumor. According to an audio recording of the meeting, Berg told the story of a sick friend who was diagnosed with cancer and had a massive tumor removed. “That’s a scary deal. He was sick for a long time,” said Berg. “We can’t let a labor contract make us sick forever and ever and ever. We have to treat the disease and that’s what we’re doing here.”

Workers have responded with disappointment and outrage. Sarah Gust, who has worked at ACSC for 40 years remarked, “The fact that Dave Berg would refer to our union, our contract as a cancerous tumor is deeply offensive to me and many of my co-workers. Some of us have had cancer or have lost loved ones to cancer. It’s a tragic, devastating disease. And that’s how Crystal Sugar management sees our union. I tell you, this just shows how much respect Dave Berg and the management have for us workers.”

Listen to the audio here.

Discussing his strategy for dealing with the union workers, Berg again used the analogy: “At some point that tumor’s got to come out. That’s what we’re doing.” Sadly, comparing unionized labor to cancer is nothing new amongst conservatives, who evidently believe workers shouldn’t be able to bargain for fair wages, benefits, and working conditions.

Another locked out worker who has been with the company for 16 years said, “Our contract represents years of struggle to protect good jobs at Crystal and build a mutually respectful relationship with management. Now, Dave Berg is throwing all of that away for greed.”

Gov. Dayton has made it clear that it’s ASC’s recalcitrance and attempt to squash labor for profit that’s preventing a solution. “It is time for American Crystal’s management to reach a fair agreement with its workers, who have contributed so much to the company’s current profitability,” he observed.

Now, a new study reveals that soda companies have been targeting black and Latino children in high numbers, diminishing parents’ attempts to encourage their kids to eat right:

A new report from Yale’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity has found that beverage companies are aggressively targeting black and Latino kids with ads to promote sports, fruit and energy drinks. The products that are promoted to kids of color happen to be among the least healthy of the 644 products studied by researchers at the university.

Black children and teens saw 80 percent to 90 percent more ads compared with white youth, including more than twice as many for Sprite, 5-hour Energy, and Vitamin Water.

From 2008 to 2010, Latino children saw 49 percent more ads for sugary drinks and energy drinks on Spanish-language TV. Latino preschoolers saw more Spanish-language ads for Coca-Cola Classic, Kool-Aid, 7 Up, and Sunny D than older Latino children and teens did.

Colorlines notes that the two largest soda companies, Pepsi and Coca-Cola, have repeatedly promised to market less to children, who are more susceptible to advertising: “Coca-Cola, for example, has previously stated publicly that they wouldn’t market ads in TV, radio and print programming aimed at kids under the age of 12.”

But the report found that soda companies have just shifted to using more sophisticated and insidious forms of advertising that promise kids rewards for purchasing sugary drinks. Kids are exposed to these messages “often without their parents’ awareness.”

Companies’ targeting of minority children is a social justice issue as well as an economic one. Just like mortgage companies that focused their predatory lending on minority communities, soda companies are preying on a particularly vulnerable group (poor children) who are already suffering the ill effects of their product and have the most to lose from consuming more. For instance, these children are less likely to have health insurance to cover the numerous medical problems associated with obesity.

When Pfizer cut its research budget this year and laid off 1,100 employees, it was not because the company needed to save money.

In fact, the drug maker had so much cash left over, it decided to buy back an additional $5 billion worth of stock on top of the $4 billion already earmarked for repurchases in 2011 and beyond. [...]

There has been a steady drumbeat of other companies laying off workers even as they have disclosed plans to buy back more stock. On June 23, Campbell Soup said it would buy back $1 billion in stock; five days later it announced plans to eliminate 770 jobs. Hewlett-Packard announced a $10 billion stock repurchase in July, and jettisoned 500 jobs in September after it discontinued its TouchPad and smartphone product lines.

“It’s an extraordinarily unimaginative way to use money,” said former Labor Secretary Robert Reich. By buying back shares and lowering the number that are in circulation, executives can make their own “earnings per share” number look better, thus boosting their bonuses.

Part of the problem is that companies don’t see any demand in the economy, thanks to high unemployment, lack of consumer confidence, and austerity at the state budget level. But at the same time that they’re using billions to enrich themselves, corporate executives are whining that the problems in the economy have to do with regulation and taxes, and spend their time pushing for new tax giveaways that would boost their already high levels of cash even higher. But if the way that they’re employing their current stockpiles of money is any indication, corporations’ attempts to secure more through lower taxes should be met with extreme skepticism.

Photo by Flickr user Joseph Seal

One of the driving forces behind the ongoing Occupy Wall Street protests is the fact that corporations have not been paying their fair share in taxes. A new report from Citizens for Tax Justice will no nothing to alleviate the protesters’ frustration.

CTJ looked at 280 companies, all of them members of the Fortune 500, and found that “while the federal corporate tax code ostensibly requires big corporations to pay a 35 percent corporate income tax rate, on average, the 280 corporations in our study paid only about half that amount.” And those who paid even half the statutory corporate tax rate paid far more than many of their competitors.

In fact, in the last three years, 78 corporations had at least one year where they paid no federal income tax at all, while 30 corporations paid not a dime over the entire three years. Those 30 corporations paid nothing, even though they made $160 billion in profits over that period:

– Seventy-eight of the 280 companies paid zero or less in federal income taxes in at least one year from 2008 to 2010…In the years they paid no income tax, these companies earned $156 billion in pretax U.S. profits. But instead of paying $55 billion in income taxes as the 35 percent corporate tax rate seems to require, these companies generated so many excess tax breaks that they reported negative taxes (often receiving outright tax rebate checks from the U.S. Treasury), totaling $21.8 billion. These companies’ “negative tax rates” mean that they made more after taxes than before taxes in those no-tax years.

– Thirty corporations paid less than nothing in aggregate federal income taxes over the entire 2008-10 period. These companies, whose pretax U.S. profits totaled $160 billion over the three years, included: Pepco Holdings (–57.6% tax rate), General Electric (–45.3%), DuPont (–3.4%), Verizon (–2.9%), Boeing (–1.8%), Wells Fargo (–1.4%) and Honeywell (–0.7%).

As CTJ’s report put it, “just as workers pay their fair share of taxes on their earnings, so should successful businesses pay their fair share on their success. But today corporate tax loopholes are so out of control that most Americans can rightfully complain, ‘I pay more federal income taxes than General Electric, Boeing, DuPont, Wells Fargo, Verizon, etc., etc., all put together.’ That’s an unacceptable situation.” And its one that lawmakers could fix, if they were willing to stand up to the nation’s biggest corporations.

Hurricane Ike destroyed dozens of homes in Seabrook. Many families are just now rebuilding, but when Brad Gana tried to pick up the pieces, he learned that Bank of America was trying to take what little he had left.

“I was shocked when they said they were foreclosing on it,” Gana told investigator Amy Davis.

Gana was working overseas when the hurricane hit, destroying his home. But even then, he said he never missed a mortgage payment. It took him days to figure out why Bank of America was foreclosing.

“It wasn’t until about 20 calls that someone said, ‘We had a homeowner’s policy on your home that you reside in, and your monthly payments have gone up,’” Gana explained. “But they never notified me that my monthly payments had gone up.”

Even after Gana’s attorney managed to halt the foreclosure, “Bank of America removed Gana’s personal effects from the property, including tools and collectibles that are now also gone.” “Bank of America is ruthless in their incompetency,” Gana said. The bank claims that it attempted to tell Gana about his higher payments, but kept having their notices returned. (Gana’s mailbox was destroyed by the storm, and he was living overseas when BofA changed his mortgage payment.)

Bank of America has been the clear laggard when it comes to getting borrowers into sustainable mortgage modifications, even foreclosing on some borrowers after they had their modifications approved. Of course, since Bank of America’s CEO Brian Moynihan has hyped the benefits of faster foreclosures, perhaps the bank doesn’t see these miscues in quite the same light as everyone else.

(HT: Harry Bradford)

The researchers mapped out the partial ownership arrangements between these 1,318 companies and represented them on the following graph, also finding that just 147 companies control 40 percent of the wealth among this group:

The top 20 firms identified in the study tended to be financial organizations, including Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.

by Auden Schendler

On October 17th, Newsweek will release its attention-getting rankings of the top “green” publicly traded global companies.

Last year, the magazine ranked Dell  #1. Dell is no slouch on operational greening: the company, along with Hewlett Packard, has led the tech industry in lifecycle stewardship, with a willingness to take back and recycle its old hardware, among many other progressive internal waste reduction measures. Dell also leads in the energy efficiency of its products.

But is Dell really the greenest company in the world? It depends on your criteria. The Newsweek analysis looks at operational issues like emissions of nine key greenhouse gases, water use, solid-waste disposal, and emissions that contribute to acid rain and smog. That’s good and important.

But if you read Climate Progress regularly, you know two things: First, that the scale of the climate problem (the response to which is what defines corporate sustainability today) is so large that voluntary corporate action won’t solve it. Second, you know that because of this, how companies operate is vastly less important than how they try to influence policy, policymakers, and public opinion. If the lobbying power of one company — Koch Industries, for example — can more or less single handedly stop climate solutions, then what other companies do as climate activists is clearly critical.

The influence of the Kochs and other wealthy lobbyists and business owners was put in stark relief by Jane Mayer at the New Yorker last August and then again last week, when she exposed Art Pope’s successful purchasing of the North Carolina legislature. The work of Pope and the Kochs (now magnified by the passage of Citizens United) means corporate advocacy and activism (and the broader issue of money in politics) is the battlefield on which climate will be solved or ignored.

And so, it makes sense for Newsweek, and the roughly dozen or so other corporate rankings like the Dow Jones Sustainability Index, to include, and heavily weigh, advocacy or activism in their ranking methodology. I’ve just published a paper, “The Factor Environmental Ratings Miss,” that goes into detail on this topic with Mike Toffel of Harvard Business School, in this month’s Sloan Management Review. (That article is available free, but you need to sign up on the site).  The article notes:

News Corporation’s climate change performance was recently rated AAA by one rating organization — yet Rolling Stone magazine named News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch No. 1 in its list of “politicians or execs blocking progress on global warming.”

Toffel, in other research, has shown that companies will respond to negative rankings, and improve their performance.

Another legendary tech company, Apple, which was admittedly late to the operational greening and product stewardship dance, ranked in at 65th in the Newsweek ratings last year. But Apple arguably did more to move the ball on climate change solutions than any other company last year, when it very publicly dropped out of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce because of that organization’s strident criticism of plans to limit greenhouse gases. (The chamber, by the way, also supports the Keystone XL pipeline, which Jim Hansen has called “game over” for climate, if allowed by Obama.)

Where might Apple rank if this bold move were included in the rating criteria? And how might the tide of the climate battle change if increasingly visible corporate rankings appropriately valued activism?

Newsweek should take note. These are the forces that are truly driving sustainability.

— Auden Schendler is vice president of sustainability at Aspen Skiing Company

There are several factors driving this income inequality — including preferential treatment of investment income, weak estate taxes, and stagnant middle-class wages — but one of the problems is that executive pay has jumped by leaps and bounds, far outstripping the income made by workers. CEOs at America’s largest companies now earn 343 times more than the typical worker. In 1970, the average CEO earned 28 times as much as the typical worker. As the Washington Post noted today, this increase occurred at the same time that worker pay was actually falling, in inflation adjusted dollars:

The gap between what workers and top executives make helps explain why income inequality in the United States is reaching levels unseen since the Great Depression.

Since the 1970s, median pay for executives at the nation’s largest companies has more than quadrupled, even after adjusting for inflation, according to researchers. Over the same period, pay for a typical non-supervisory worker has dropped more than 10 percent, according to Bureau of Labor statistics.

And much of the increase was driven by nothing more than companies simply trying to ensure that their CEO’s pay was above the median for their industry, regardless of that CEO’s performance:

Companies have long hid the way they set executive pay, but in late 2006, the Securities and Exchange Commission began compelling companies to disclose the specifics of how they use peer groups to determine executive pay.

Since then, researchers have found that about 90 percent of major U.S. companies expressly set their executive pay targets at or above the median of their peer group. This creates just the kinds of circumstances that drive pay upward.

For those keeping score, the median CEO pay in 2010 was $9 million. For “top executives,” the median pay package comes in at about $4.9 million. This cuts across industries, while companies tend to target their pay within their respective industry, but it gives you a sense for the scale of the pay packages these companies are looking at when deciding what to pay their own people.

The nation’s biggest banks could be the poster children for this sort of corporate excess, as their CEOs received huge salaries and bonuses, even as their firms were blowing up themselves (and the global economy) on toxic mortgages. The Post noted that Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozillo “earned more than $180 million as he led the company to the brink of ruin during the five years before the housing bust. At times, his pay had been set at the 90th percentile of peers.” For those looking to address income inequality, it seems that reining in executive pay is a good place to start.

As something of a theology nerd, I particularly liked the parts of this section that are about the ways, both beautiful and terrifying, that technology brings us closer to the divine — or at least, redefines the boundaries of what’s considered possible and what’s considered miraculous. The Turing authorities who come to arrest Case are both literally and metaphorically advocates of those boundaries. They hold the guns to the AIs heads not simply because of practical concerns, because they see unincumbered artificial intelligences free to pursue their will to knowledge as a way evil comes into the world. As one of them says: “You have no care for your species. For thousands of years men dreamed of pacts with demons. Only now are such things possible. And what would you be paid with? What would your price be, for aiding this thing to free itself and grow?”

Of course Case doesn’t accept that conception and forges forward. Wintermute kills his pursuers, freeing him to dive into the ice and encounter Wintermute’s opposite number, a boy on a beach in a dream, as untechnological a vision as we have in the entire novel:

“You’re the other AI. You’re Rio. You’re the one who wants to stop Wintermute. What’s your name? Your Turing code. What is it?” The boy did a handstand in the surf, laughing. He walked on his hands, then flipped out of the water. His eyes were Riviera’s, but there was no malice there. “To call up a demon you must learn its name. Men dreamed that, once, but now it is real in another way. You know that, Case. Your business is to learn the names of programs, the long formal names, names the owners seek to conceal. True names . . .” “A Turing code’s not your name.” “Neuromancer,” the boy said, slitting long gray eyes against the rising sun. “The lane to the land of the dead. Where you are, my friend. Marie-France, my lady, she prepared this road, but her lord choked her off before I could read the book of her days. Neuro from the nerves, the silver paths. Romancer. Necromancer. I call up the dead. But no, my friend,” and the boy did a little dance, brown feet printing the sand, “I am the dead, and their land.” He laughed. A gull cried. “Stay. If your woman is a ghost, she doesn’t know it. Neither will you.” “You’re cracking. The ice is breaking up.” “No,” he said, suddenly sad, his fragile shoulders sagging. He rubbed his foot against the sand. “It is more simple than that. But the choice is yours.” The gray eyes regarded Case gravely. A fresh wave of symbols swept across his vision, one line at a time. Behind them, the boy wriggled, as though seen through heat rising from summer asphalt. The music was loud now, and Case could almost make out the lyrics.

I think part of what I like about this moment is that it is, in a way, a strong statement in support of the appeal of the irregularity, mysticism, and oddness of humanity. An AI’s invested in the power of names, the life story and tragic death of the woman who dreamed him into being, whose youthful experiences he incorporated into the world he’s created for his ghosts. There’s something almost generous about Neuromancer’s wistful desire to provide a refuge for what’s left of Linda. Even technology strives towards heaven.

The most important lost soul, the secret architect of Straylight, of Tessier-Ashpool, is the late Marie-France. There’s something incredibly poignant about 3Jane’s essay about the family’s plans, the disappointments of their will to power: “Tessier and Ashpool climbed the well of gravity to discover that they loathed space. They built Freeside to tap the wealth of the new islands, grew rich and eccentric, and began the construction of an extended body in Straylight. We have sealed ourselves away behind our money, growing inward, generating a seamless universe of self.”

But there are two questions I have about all of this that I think Gibson’s not particularly clear about? Is corporate power good or bad? And was Marie-France’s plan going to be effective? Would Marie-France’s vision have brought something new into being? Or would her plan to create a symbiosis between the members of her family and their AIs would have just provided a more stable immortal platform for the continuation of their inevitable instability and corruption? Case describes a difference between corporations and he understands them and the Tessier-Ashpools, but it’s not clear if the family model is better, though it certainly is more human and more tragic:

Power, in Case’s world, meant corporate power. The zaibatsus, the multinationals that shaped the course of human history, had transcended old barriers. Viewed as organisms, they had attained a kind of immortality. You couldn’t kill a zaibatsu by assassinating a dozen key executives; there were others waiting to step up the ladder, assume the vacated position, access the vast banks of corporate memory. But Tessier-Ashpool wasn’t like that, and he sensed the difference in the death of its founder. T-A was an atavism, a clan. He remembered the litter of the old man’s chamber, the soiled humanity of it, the ragged spines of the old audio disks in their paper sleeves. One foot bare, the other in a velvet slipper.

So are we supposed to regard Marie-France’s death as a tragedy? Her husband is certainly repulsive, waking up to indulge his addictions and to have sex with and murder clones of his daughters. It doesn’t seem like he’s contributing much to the governance or direction of the company, treating the AIs as if they’re troublesome annoyances. Even if she’d lived, it’s not clear that her family would have truly been able to comprehend or carry her legacy forward. 3Jane clearly admires her mother but is frank about the fact that she doesn’t quite understand the older woman, telling Molly “She was quite a visionary…Fascinating. I’ll play her tapes for you, nearly a thousand hours. But I’ve never understood her, really, and with her death, her direction was lost. All direction was lost, and we began to burrow into ourselves. Now we seldom come out. I’m the exception there.”